Bells, bugging and Brian Williams at the Democratic debate.

I've been playing a lot of poker lately. About two months ago, I got a bee up my ass about Texas Hold 'Em?the kind of poker you see in those ESPN broadcasts?and now I'm playing all the time. I suck at it, but I've learned a few things. And one of those is that you have to be comfortable with big positions that rest on sheer luck. Just throw a bunch of chips in, throw your hands up in the air, and don't worry about it. The more you worry about it, the more obvious you are.

It's the same way with hallucinogens. Sometimes they're wonderful, and sometimes you need psychiatric help when it's over. The key thing is not to worry about it. Just eat 'em and go. Be confident that it will all work out, and march out into the world.

I was convinced as late as the entrance into the Democratic debate at Pace University two weeks ago that everything was going to be all right. An hour before, I had eaten a small pile of mushrooms with New York Press Associate Editor Alex Zaitchik, who also attended the event. I'm not going to get into why. That's irrelevant at this point. The only thing that's relevant is that we ended up getting about four hours worth of Why Not. In full Dolby surround sound. And the first hint of trouble came on the stairway down.

There is almost nothing, short of outright physical torture, that goes worse with hallucinogens than an environment that would not make sense even when sober. The debate pressroom was such a place. Not until we passed through the metal detectors did we even realize that we were not going to be allowed into the actual hall where the debate was being held.

Instead, they directed us down a dark concrete stairwell into a gigantic basketball gymnasium, where about 300 journalists were sitting glumly at SAT test tables in front of a colossal, Albert Speer-esque arrangement of gleaming televisions. The confusing realization that we had to be accredited to come watch an event on television?an event that, as far as we knew, might actually have been held on Mars?was bad enough. Even worse was the actual room. It seemed to have been designed specifically, by the military perhaps, to irritate the person on hallucinogens. Oppressive fluorescent lights everywhere, a vague sucking sound coming from the vents, burning shit-brown patches of gym floor poking out from under rented gray carpeting. And walking to and fro everywhere were nervous packs of the very ugliest people in the United States?the national press corps.

At about 3:45?fifteen minutes before the start of the debate?Alex and I panicked. "Maybe we should just go upstairs for a little while," he said. "You know, walk around on the street? anything?this is awful?." I agreed, and we raced up the steps, the stairwell resounding with echoes. But at the exit to the stairwell, there was a fat security guard with a splotchy face, your standard six-hit-dice dungeon monster.

"Where you going?" he barked.

"Um," I said. "Is there another room that we could go to? Maybe one more relaxing?"

He stared at me, confused. "The media room is downstairs," he said.

"But there's only one room!" I protested.

An official-looking woman with beady eyes, a nest of lanyards hanging from her neck, appeared from behind him. "It's big enough," she said, pointing back to the stairwell.

You know how it is on those drugs. You're vulnerable to suggestion. It did not occur to us then that we could have just ignored her and walked out the door. She pointed to the stairs, so that's where we went. "So that's how it is!" I thought to myself fatalistically, as we walked down. I was afraid to look at Alex; the last time I'd checked, he looked on the verge of tears. We settled into the worst two seats in the house, in the back and thirty feet from the nearest television, and returned to the business of "covering" the debate.

As the image of Brian Williams appeared on the screen, I found myself longing for trees, a river, maybe a dune overlooking the ocean. In the city, one usually needs a sense of irony to appreciate the landscape. But my ability to digest things and place them in a humorous context was gone. All sorts of horrifying stimuli were racing unfiltered straight to the fear center in my brain. In the first minutes of the debate, I found myself gripping the sides of my chair?the way you do in an airplane during turbulence?when Williams, in explaining the rules of order, introduced the game-show bell to be used when the candidates ran too long with their speeches.

"Somewhere at 'Jeopardy,' they're wondering where it went," Williams joked. Up on Mars, the "audience" laughed. For minutes I tried to piece together, rationally, why this was funny, and could not. This is a debate for the presidency of the United States! Why isn't someone calling the police?

The same was true for the little WSJ and CNBC sponsor logos that were arranged behind the candidates' heads, in the same fashion as those patchwork "Protecting America's Elderly" backgrounds Bush uses in his speeches. The creepy mix of space-age marketing and politics sent a chill up my spine.

Then, when they cut to commercial after about 10 minutes, I nearly fell out of my chair.

"How can they have commercials during a debate?" I asked Alex, the panic clear in my voice.

Alex said nothing. He was recoiling in his chair from me and eyeing me with obvious caution. It was clear to me that he had been thinking deeply over the root causes of his predicament: The debate? It was what it was, it couldn't help itself. But I was his friend! I should have known better.

"I'm sorry!" I said.

"What?" he said, then went back to watching the tv.

The debate rolled on. I remember only bits and pieces of the actual telecast. I took a great deal of notes, but few of them made sense later. In the first hour I was apparently concentrating heavily on the theme of anxiety, which was everywhere in the event: the candidates racing against the clock to get their speeches out, the plain panic in their faces at the prospect of slipping and saying something stupid; even Williams looked charged with terror, afraid to fuck things up. (He eventually did, calling Howard Dean "Senator Dean"). No one?not the candidates, not the journalists?was enjoying this.

By the second hour, we evened out enough to cope: I even managed to interview some of the candidates after the event. I asked Kucinich, Gephardt and Edwards how they could handle being up there in the terror chamber, with that goddamn bell ringing the whole time. Wasn't it horrible? Didn't you just want to run offstage?

"Well, I think they're doing the best they can," said Edwards, a gigantic aw-shucks smile on his face. "You know, there are a lot of us, and they've got to find a way to get us all in there? I think they're doing just great?"

He went on. As he spoke, I began to notice big blue lines pulsating in his face, just below the beachy surface of his orange makeup. I turned my head and focused on a white spot on the wall across the room, but kept the microphone near his mouth. He kept talking. Thirteen more months of this, I thought, as he rambled on. I might not make it.

Hours later, Alex and I sat in the courtyard outside his studio in the East Village, sipping beers.

"Nice garden," I said, feeling the dirt between my toes.

"Yeah," he said. "It's the reason we got this place."